Garden, Tabernacle & Temple … Small Scale Models Of God’s Cosmic Sanctuary

Psalm 78:69 says something amazing about Israel’s Temple: God “built the sanctuary like the heights, [He built the sanctuary] like the earth which he has founded forever.” this tells us that in some way God modeled the Temple to be a little replica of the entire heaven and earth. Yet, in Is. 66:1 God says, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where then is a house you could build for me?” God never intended that Israel’s little localized temple last forever, since, like the Eden temple, Israel’s temple was a small model of something much bigger: God and His universal presence, which could never eternally be contained by any localized earthly structure.

Israel’s tabernacle and temple were a miniature model of God’s huge cosmic temple that was to dominate the heaven and earth at the end of time. That is, the temple was a symbolic model pointing not merely to the present cosmos but also to the new heaven and earth that would be perfectly filled with God’s presence. That it was a miniature symbolic model of the coming Temple that would fill heavens and earth is evident from the following figurative features of the three sections of the temple: the holy of holies, the holy place, and the outer courtyard.

G. K. Beale

Christianity is Worth Fighting For … Rushdoony

Chrysostom, in dealing also with the conflict w/ Caesar warned his people in his sermon “Concerning the Statutes” Homily III 19

“This certainly I foretell and testify, that although this cloud should pass away, and we yet remain in the same condition of listlessness, we shall again have to suffer much heavier evils than those we are not dreading; for I do not so much fear the wrath of the Emperor, as your own listlessness.”

“Here Chrysostom put his finger on the heart of the matter: the threat was less the Emperor and more a listless and indifferent church. The same problem confronts us today. The greater majority of church members do not feel that Christianity is worth fighting for, let alone dying for. They only want the freedom to be irrelevant, and to emit pious gush as a substitute for faithfulness and obedience. In soap opera religion, life is w/o dominion; instead, it is a forever-abounding mess, met with a sensitive and bleeding heart. Soap opera religion is the faith of the castrated, of the impotent, and the irrelevant. The devotees of soap opera religion are full of impotent self pity and rage over the human predicament, but are devoid of any constructive action; only destruction and negation become them.”

R. J. Rushdoony
Roots of Reconstruction — pg 27